We have likely all heard of the so-called "Mozart Effect," the claim that listening to music increases intelligence. While the often-cited 1993 study never actually claimed such a profound conclusion, the resultant publicity focused the nation's attention on the evidence of music's positive effect on various types of cognitive skills.…

Background: Mothers facilitate their young hearing children's word learning by making reference explicit for novel words through physical designation (e.g., with deictic gestures) and by isolating words in simple syntactic frames. As children's language skills develop, such modifications decrease. Less is known about hearing mothers' support to…

Of all the developmental difficulties that may be present in childhood, language impairment is probably the most common. It is of vast importance to prevent cumulative negative consequences of these impairments. The present study evaluates the effects of a language and activity-based intervention programme on verbal and non-verbal performance and…

Applied behavioral psychology pivots on the formation and alteration of stimulus function: on how stimuli come to differentially affect behavior and how these effects can be altered when they prove problematic. Relational frame theory (RFT) offers an account of how uniquely verbal processes transform stimulus functions. Acceptance and commitment…

We provide an empirically updated Skinnerian-based account of verbal behavior development, describing how the speaker-as-own-listener capability in children (the capability of children to behave as speaker and listener within their own skin) accrues and how it is pivotal to becoming verbal. The theory grew from (a) findings in experiments with…

Being literate involves being able to move from the ability to read and write to include different forms of knowledge and modes of communication of the milieu (drumming, dancing, story-telling, etc.). This article examines the new literacy allowed through the existence of two types of schools (bilingual and monolingual) in Burkina Faso, in West…

Research into the acquisition of L2 German word order has provided strong evidence for a sequence of incremental stages of development. Studies of the acquisition of German verb morphology so far have focused on establishing a correlation between the acquisition of word order and of verb morphology, neglecting the question how verb morphology per…

Prelinguistic vocal development is "the process by which infants and toddlers produce increasingly more complex, phonetically diverse, and speech-like utterances before they say words on a regular basis" (Ertmer, 2005, p. 85). Research has shown that children with bilateral, moderate-to-profound hearing loss experience delays and deficits in vocal…

A long-standing debate in native and foreign language learning revolves around the use of computers to promote genuine social and professional communication. Webquests are a very common way of using Web resources to research a variety of topics, and if appropriately used can trigger the situations necessary to develop both written and oral…

A study of 25 expert teachers and their shared reading lessons in grades 3-8 suggests that teachers focus their modeling during shared reading in four categories: comprehension, vocabulary, text structures, and text features. (Contains 1 figure.)

The author calls for incorporating into English classes what he calls museum-based pedagogy, arguing that it enables the teaching of multiple literacies: verbal, visual, technological, social, and critical. In part, this pedagogy consists of classroom instruction that enables students to understand the persuasive nature of museum displays--the…

We tested the effects of an intensive tact instruction procedure on the emission of verbal operants in non-instructional settings by three preschool students with developmental delays. The participants were selected because they emitted low numbers pure verbal operants in non-instructional settings throughout the school day. Specifically, we…

Research in psychology and in linguistics has converged to suggest that the syntactic frames in which verbs appear carry meanings of their own, apart from the meaning of the verbs themselves. To date, however, a gap has existed between these two lines of research: Research in psychology has inferred the meanings of frames only indirectly; research…

We tested the effects of teaching an auditory match to sample repertoire on the emergence of the listener half of the verbal developmental cusp of Naming for 2-preschool students with language-based disabilities. The study was conducted in a special education CABAS[R] preschool. Neither of the students had selection or discrimination responses,…